I stashed an unfinished copy of this file in the directory where you find this file now. Go read it all again. Much has been added. File: losing_it.txt Content: off we go into the first months of the rest of my life. Life's going on. Fuck, january is nearly over. Randwick seems to be a place I return to a lot, and when I go there I see a lot of people I know, generally by accident. I dropped in and saw old Mary again, but she didn't have much time to talk since she was off to dinner in the retirement hole (l and m are close on the keyboard but that's not a typo). I bumped into my old protein biochemistry lecturer Gary King on the footpath, and we had a bit of a yack about information theory, he's heard of Stormo's work but Schneider is much better, I said. I hadda chat to Graham so I know what I'll be doing for work this Feb, but it's sub-optimally configured, there's a 3hour hole in the middle of the daily schedule, for which I don't get paid. He's been trying to get me interested in a phd for aaages and I told him a while ago about my uh, foreshortening but he's still trying to get me interested in an immunological approach to fraud detection. I read someone's hons thesis about this, and although it was interesting of itself the error count (from the biologist's perspective), and the crude nature of the project when generally compared to what is actually implemented in living organisms made it a somewhat annoying read. Anyway, fuck it, other things interest me. How much information does a molecule contain? Quantify that for the general case, and suddenly you know what's the *real* computational load required to run life. It's all a computer, implemented chemically, but saying that's silly until there's math to support it. I went to see Dave Goldstein, the staff specialist out at Prince of Wales, recommended to me by Paul. His office waiting room is populated by people who look like they're dying, either exhibiting that grey pallor of the metabolically broken, or are totally devoid of hair... eyelashes, eyebrows, the works. There are posters on the wall about a wig library for these people whose hair has fallen out entirely. I asked him why he got into oncology and he mentioned it was 'cos his dad was killed by brain cancer. Um. Yeah. I asked for that. I guess if he has any baggage it's the right sort. He reckons chemokines such as he is able to administer (interleukin, interferon, inter-galactic-hyperdrive, inter-yer-arm) apart from being as expensive as hell are gonna make me very, very sick, for very likely bugger-all benefit, and if I do decide to take 'em it should be when I'm full of lumps. If I'm slugged out in bed for six months, that's very likely to be a total loss unless I'm full of something aggressive which would wipe me out in less than six months. It cures about three percent of people. There's some vaccine stuff going on in Brissie and Melbourne, which might make use of the chunk o' kidney tumor I kept on ice, but I'd have to go down there and check it out. There's also some experimental (read: failure prone) vaccine stuff going on with POW in July, and I've volunteered to be a guinea pig for that. It's a vaccine which works by provoking an immune reaction to your own angiogenesis signalling proteins, which I imagine might prove something of a problem since I can see it inhibiting healing and regrowth which requires microvascularisation to work properly. Trust your mechanic? Uh, no. Bill The Lump was still palpable. I asked if someone'd suck some of Bill out and slap it on a slide and he said he could arrange it in a few seconds. Cool. Finally. I went upstairs to the lab services level. The FNAB (fine needle aspirate biopsy) happened in a small room just up the corridor from where I'd spent a year doing honours in pathology in Bill Rawlinson's virus research student torture chamberrrr, uh, yeah, laboratory. A chap with more k's and z's in his surname than is normal for anyone of non-Polish origin gently aimed a 25 gague needle at Bill and sunk it into my neck, which didn't feel pleasant but didn't feel too bad either. Withdrawing the plunger to create a vacuum, and moving the tip around to grab as many cells as possible, he used the syringe to suck some of the guts out of the node. He removed the needle, slapped the contents of the syringe barrel on a slide, stained it, took it to the next room and gawked at it through a binocular stereomicroscope, and came back to tell me it had abnormal cells in it. Well, duh. He wanted more tissue so went in again with a 23 gague needle (fine, but noticable, like a REALLY BIG mozzie) and sucked out some more of the lymph node's guts. It'll take 'em a couple of days to get it characterised properly. He's encouraged that it's smaller. I'm not fooled. I feel sort of ashamed to say I was shanghaid on the Newtown footpath by a bunch of very smooth (what did Joss call 'em? Chuggers?) spruikers, looking for donations for the World Wildlife Fund. Fuck, signing up was a painful process, but by the time I'd filled in the form I'd come to the conclusion that I'd been had - I was prepared to cough 'em bux for a year, but there was no `end date' on the form. Anywhere. I felt like a prick when i walked into the bank the next day and closed the bank account to which they had monthly auto withdrawl authority, and started another one, but fuck 'em, if enviro charities are gonna be greedy, they can fuck off. I notice you *can* tell these people you're not gonna live long enough to see any benefit to the environment from your donation and they won't care. Maybe my susceptibility to these people is some sort of diagnostic clue that I am not really convinced I'm dying, but maybe not. Rather like the paired facts that I'm a pill-popping freak but I just don't have any resistance left against the gustatory attractions of the humble tim-tam. Next day I did most of the fiddly renov bits in the sibling's kitchen and it's starting to look fit for human habitation again. Amazingly, before I did the second coat of paint under the benchtop, there was already something-or-other splattered on the freshly painted wall, 'cos she doesn't aim at anything, like, say, the garbage bag, when disposing of her garbage. The new pine (I choose the knotty plank because it has more character) shelves are cut and mounted, the oven top has a new circuit breaker, we're ready for the next coat. The usual filth is already piling up in the sink. I also fixed her bedroom light, which she broke while trying to change the bulb, which is diagnostic of (why is there no character on keyboards for biting one's tongue?) ... well, a certain level of mechanical ineptitude. I replaced it with something made entirely of metal so she'll have a harder time trying to destroy it. In the arvo I was trawling the 'Clan list. Lots of people are bitchin' about how the Port Kembla copper smelter is suddenly submerged in a thick soup of security dweebs (driving teensy little security cars and pretending they're V8's) after last week's mass expedition. I thought that I should go check out a storm drain near Guildford, discovered by Stray, and mentioned enthusiastically by someone-or-other who had explored it. Of course it pissed rain just before I left. It's off Duck River. Fuck River is the cognomen a tedious drain which Melb clan found on their first northern foray into Sydney, and the poor reputation of the drain so named has discouraged any exploration on the banks of the homophonic Duck River of which it is a minor tributary. We did not, by the way, see any ducks. It had rained heavily in the late arvo, everything was damp, the flow was up. Siolo and Stray arrived. Access was via the outlet, which is a massive concrete-walled sediment pond, in the middle of the only remnant of clay plains paperbark swamp forest anywhere in the entire Sydney basin - the rest has been flattened over the last two centuries so people can have sports fields for important stuff like soccer training. Getting in was a little bit hard core; after walking through the reeds which were all blown flat by the flood surge, we had to pass through a sump and while walking in we were all submerged up to our nipples in fresh, clean, cold rainwater - exhilarating after a hot sticky day. We climbed out dripping with drain juice into an unusually huge pipe, about three metres diam, with almost no graffiti on it (the local bomber crews and tag artists are presumably dissuaded by the swim). It has a couple of funky rooms, some shape changes, and comes out at a mega-security fence with air-tube vibration sensors tied to it, in the other end of the tiny little remnant of paperbark forest for which this drain is the hydraulic linkage. So we went back down the drain and came out where we got in. I think Siolo got some shots of me with my shirt off up to my armpits in drain outlet pondwater. He tells me Fishie's had the Cave Clan logo tattooed on his arm. Wow. Fortunately for you, reading this rant, some of my days disappear in a haze of mundanity so trivial it isn't worth the effort of recording. The 'net's full of enough crap as it is. So you miss a tedious thursday. I think I got up a tree with a circular saw and discovered I preferred my machete anyway. Whoopee. Leakage. Arr. Dontcha hate it when the oncologist sends a report to yer referring doctor, which happens to be yer dad, and it contains details you'd prefer yer dad didn't know, like, how when you admit frankly to yer oncologist that you `have a regular partner' and it ends up in the summary notes sent to yer dad in the post later on? I've gone to some effort to keep my carnal involvements right the hell off their radar. The phrasing is awkward.... there _is_ a person to whom I am known carnally on an semi-frequent basis, but I don't `have' them, I don't own or control them or anything like that, and she's happily shagging other people too with my blessing - this is hardly a regular partner, in that sense. But a small slice of my private life is revealed to dad nevertheless, that I'd prefer he didn't know. The amusing irony of this is that he knows who this person is in rather greater detail than I do, in some respects. Dad's her gynaecologist. Friday night was kind of amusing. Spectacular lightning crackled over Sydney, feral megajoules crash-burning their own electricity grid into the black sky with miles of galvanotactic varicosities, pissing short photons which lingered momentarily on our scotopic retinas like evaporating graffiti. I watched it from the windowsill as it flash-froze the passing cars to the road in its random blue strobelight. To the backdrop of this lightshow I discovered my load of cannabis cookies have passed their get-stoned-by date, but this didn't matter especially since the atmosphere was quite pleasant anyway. Willow said it was gonna be a non-clan gathering and most of the Sydney Clan turned up (including Fishie and his VERY BIG tattoo). People ripped .mp3s off the Kazaa peer network, drank wine, bitched about their lives in mundane, non-drain space. We staggered out into the drizzle at about 3am. Two small, poorly vented rooms, and arrrr shit why must people smoke? It makes my eyes hurt, and makes me smell bad. Here's a three layer headfuck. See if you figure it out before I reveal it. I slept on the couch at Wolfie's new place, where I discovered an identical copy of the hi-fi I hauled out of the dumpster. Maybe there's a manual for the hi-fi somewhere in the place, I am still fucked if I can drive that equaliser thingo without some instructions. Just at the mo, I dunno if the people who live there quite trust me. They had chained their two bicycles together, to the building's plumbing, by some steel cable and a combination lock to which they'd forgotten the combination. They asked me to break the lock to free their bicycles. After a few minutes trying to do so with their inadeqate tools (eg, screwdriver with easily breakable end) I looked at the lock and remembered my first childhood encounter with one of these things which would have been when I was oh, six. I wonder if ... I thought to myself. I remember its combination, too. 2136. Confident in what I remembered of the lock design, I straightened my arms, gripped the opposite ends of the lock in each hand, tightened my fingers hard, stiffened my wrists, and parted my elbows which flexed the device hard enough to snap its spindle. Pretty good for a limp-wristed computer geek. I'm not superman, by any means. I exploited a classic design stupidity where by adding more theoretical security, the system is made physically weaker. This is more common than one thinks. In engineering, it is the use of a beam so heavy that it can't hold up its own weight. In cyptography, it is the use of a cyptographic algorithm which by its very complexity renders the machine on which it is executed subtly broken. In locksmithing, it's usually a tradeoff in convenience for security. Having to carry keys is the price you pay for the inability to remember numbers. These combination locks come in two kinds: four digit (10000 combinations) and five digit (100000 combinations). Although by adding one more rotor (ring with ten digits on it), they've increased the time it'd take someone to go through the combinations by a factor of ten, it was the additional length of the lock body with the additional rotor on it which made it long enough for me to have enough lock to manually grab in order to exert a torque sufficient to snap it. And yeah, like anyone's gonna try and pick through 10e5 combinations let alone 10e6. Worse, if you look at the combination mechanism from the outside it looks heavier and tougher than the cable to which it is swaged, but the combination mechanism exacts a toll in cross-sectional integrity greater than the benefit gained by having a combination lock at all. A cylinder lock is not dependant on the physical toughness of its decoding mechanism, whereas a combination lock is. End headfuck. Are you getting an idea how my head works? The explanatory paragraphs I write, like those above, are the very convincing, logically espoused, cover-up for the truth, which is in this case, : if they'd gone to the effort of building the lock out of something other than a pisspoor subspecies of metalliferous Taiwanese dogshit I'da had no chance busting it with my bare hands. How can I rely on what I think in a mind which only occasionally catches itself pulling the wool over its own eyes? I can't, but I've spotted it this time. The whole lock paragraph is a diversion, to the quiet thought that while I lay on the couch at Wolfie's place completely aware that I'd much rather be curled up on her mattress enveloped in her waste heat, I wouldn't let myself feel bad for not being there. But I wanted to be there and wanted to feel bad for not being there. I was sorta just frozen in the neutral zone. What's going on... what planet am I on at the moment? It's worse. The logic, the vocab, are a veneer of rationality over what I suspect is a lot more churning than I'm ready to let escape into my keyboard. I should be writing out of the other side of my animal, the side which laughs and gets cranky and everything else from depressed to horny to elated. But they don't write well. Or I don't write them well, or something like that. Or they want to say things I don't want to hear. Wolfie's got a lot of stuff on her plate at the moment from her last relationship anyway, and I'm sort of torn between further involvement with her, and staying outta there, and its partly 'cos I don't think she needs the baggage I'm starting to sling around with me about being on the brink of carking it. It's an unfair card to play on people, but it's an unfair card to be holding, too. I'm bored of this irksome mortality. I don't want to be dead until I'm actually dead. Speaking of bringing that about it turns out I can save the azide for another task. There's a great patch of ricinis communis on the railway siding not four km from here. The seeds are full of a 70kDa two-part albumin protein notorious for its ability to bind irreversibly to ribosomes and thence block peptide synthesis. The dosages are tiny, ng's per kilo, much better than electron transport chain inhibitors. I just don't know how fast it acts. Big proteins take a while to diffuse, I suspect. Sat 24 I was on King St, and I bumped into Lini, a woman with whom I was in a relationship for about five months a couple of years ago. Her hair had changed. Her *eyes* had changed (on closer inspection this was due to some wierdo contact lenses she's wearing... yeah, like someone half Japanese and half Chinese is gonna have green eyes). I haven't seen her since she left the country to go to France ostensibly to study but she ended up wandering around most of Eastern Europe. It turns out she's been back since October but never looked me up. She got engaged to someone she met in September 2002 while she was in the loop with me. She said I hadn't changed a bit. I'm wondering, is there something about my personality which means I'm finding myself to be frequently a last-shag before marriage, or is it demographic, or statistical? I'm glad she's out there doing whatever she's doing. ------ Why, you might be asking yourself, was this file called losing_it.txt ? I think it's 'cos I'm letting go, which might be another way of saying I think I'm losin' my grip. I can't decide if, in the light of my carb-hungry tumor load, my chowing into a bowl of pasta is diagnostic that I haven't quite accepted my mortality, or that I have accepted it and, a metabolic kamikai pilot, I am pushing the throttle forward, diving downwards faster, waiting to be claimed by the ascending angry plumbous rain or the indifferent, frozen hydrous wastes stretching in every direction. Provoke it or not, it'll kill me. My immanent eschaton is distracting me, eating my brain. It follows me into the shower, into women's bedrooms, out onto the highway, it goes with me to dinner and I swallow it with breakfast. Broken bits of poetic stuff are falling into my stream of awareness, and I'm not even motivated to flesh out any sort of rhyming structure or metre or even polish 'em up like I used to. if i seem diverted it's not quite knowing why that i persist in living now i'm condemned to die i don't know why you hold me nor why i'm holding you; seek a place to hide from blank despair is what i do. grasp me, clench me, anchor me, convince me that you know; hold me gently if i come, and tightly when i go. But... whooah. Weepy emotionality aside, it really does focus one's attention on how cool it is to be alive when the alternative is just around the corner. It's saturday I just did something rude. Dad mentioned that Frank and Trev, who invited me out to dinner with them on the 30th, rang up and at some point in the conversation they had, Dad decided he'd come along. I mentioned if this was the case, I would not go. The deal was, Frank, Trev, Me, chat. I am not gonna sit there and politely spectate as these three guys, dear as they are to me in various ways, chat about the same stuff they've talked about in my absence for the last thirty years and anyway dad will not be able to not tell me to mind my language when talking to his workmates of the last three decades, which he couldn't help doing if he was there. No bait'n'switch, thanks. So I told dad, who said ok, he won't go. I love the guy dearly but not when he's in a setting which makes him behave overly parentally in public. Sun 25th. I saw the final Lord of the Rings flick today, which aside from everything else blew my head off simply by being so cinematographically vast and varied as to exceed my understanding of how they could possibly make such a work and do it so well. Dad liked it but he didn't see the 2nd one in the series, so he didn't understand it. I notice on the 'Clan list people are talking about how 10 people did the Big Crawl In to the Big Day Out through the drainage in Homebush, and saw the show for the nth year in a row without paying a cent. Aphex Twin was muddy but apparently Peaches was OK. Cool 8-) I have cleaned out the back work shed, as a consequence of my recognition that many of the things in it were things I had acquired for use in my forseeable lifespan, a parameter which has now changed, so I've flung a lot of stuff. This has the happy upshot that there's more room in the tiny outbuilding. Some of the stuff has now been installed as I had intended to do for ages but never got around to it - an aluminium vent grille in the door and a half-horsepower (about 370 watts) centrifigal blower I scavenged from a roadside in Arncliffe in 1997 are gonna stop the place from being so damned hot and stuffy in summer, and will have the handy additional property of pulling solder fumes, oversprayed paint, solvent vapours and such away from me as I work. The blower is quiet but moves some serious air. Red jarrah sawdust and aluminium shavings made an interesting mix of colours on the cement floor. I put a new power cord on the 1967 10MHz valve-driven Tektronics storage CRO I own, since the old cord had *depolymerised* And I found some interesting jars I thought I'd lost, which were interesting for their chemical contents rather than their actual pattern. Now, what betanitrostyrene was this, exactly? Monday. Austrafuckinalia day. Yeah, hooray. Why we don't call this Dependance Day and reschedule it to July 4th in recognition of our current status as an economic fiefdom of the United States eludes me. Every indigenous fuckin' culture which ever appeared here, be it derived from rockchoppin' pom convicts or the brown people who they took the country from a couple of centuries ago is now mostly supplanted by mass-produced asinine crap which either arrives in shipping containers or is electromagnetically sprayed upon us by various geostationary satellites around the clock. I was going through my top drawer a couple of days ago to get sufficient ID for this new bank account I wanted to create, and found my passport. It's gonna expire ten days before I turn 33. I wondered momentarily if I should burn it. I am ashamed to be a citizen of this soulless, vapid, excuse for a nation, and would similarly be ashamed to present evidence of same anywhere else in the world. I don't think I'll be fucked renewing it. Looks like I'm staying home to die. I decided to free myself from the ridiculous circumstance of being in a monogamous relationship with someone who won't shag me. She invited me around today, on the day she was moving house, and I knew it was gonna involve a bit of hefting furniture, and I did it, 'cos it's just a friendly thing to do - moving's a stress. The expected pattern has remained the same. No, she's not going to Newcastle or Brissie yet, maybe she's staying in Sydney (read, maybe she'll still get around to shagging me) for a few weeks yet. Arrr, no girl, you go where you like, it's just not fair to offer me something you're not prepared to share with me and then deny me the right to seek it elsewhere... and she knew other women were keen for a go at me, since when I told her this was the case (it sounds like a bold, egotistical and possibly even false claim but I'm just giving you the facts ma'am) she kind of tossed it back at me later as a justification for her not offering to shag me. Lets get down to some meaty technicalities: after about the fifth time we'd been naked in the sack and we still hadn't shagged, I mentioned to her quietly that I had no idea what the hell I was doing there at all, given the predicate under which I was even in the building, and mentioned my frustration about the whole situation. She asked me not to leave, and yeah we did subsequently, technically, fuck. Technically is the right word, too. But her fellating me until I'm hard, jumping on for a while then jumping off without anyone even getting off was a dispiriting, loveless, perfunctory waste of an opportunity to actually share our carnal talents (and everybody has them) - I've had more uplifting moments with my left hand. I'm faintly annoyed with myself for submitting to this leash for so long (Hmm, Jan 02-27). Non-shagging aside, I can't say I'm gonna miss someone who wouldn't really reveal themselves to me to _begin_ with, but I do feel like I've missed an opportunity to get to know her... I asked her a couple of years ago `What's your story?' and she answered `You don't want to know.' Oh-kay. She filled me in with some of that background stuff she said I didn't want to know, and I shook my head, wondering why she didn't tell me earlier, it would have helped me understand her, a LOT. As is, I can see she's just living a busy life and isn't gonna have time for a bloke, but why didn't she know that? If she keeps this up a lot of blokes are gonna be pissed off at her. She said she'd invite me to her going-away party and I don't think I'll bother going. I'll be workin' in Feb anyway. As I was about to leave she asked me if I wanted to see the Lord of the Rings. She was a bit stroppy when I told her I saw it yesterday with my dad. We had a date, she said. We had never set a date, and I didn't feel especially inclined to tell her I wasn't gonna wait till the flick was no longer being screened for us to actually get around to point our eyeballs at it, so this somewhat bitter comment didn't make it out of my gob. Thankfully. I'm not _that_ cut up about it. She's got her reasons and I'm sure they're good ones from where she sits. I deleted her SMSs which had accumulated in my fone, including such false advertising as: Eat my food, lick my dog see you soon and we'll fuck like hogs. So I don't even have her number now. This is the nanosecond emotional brutality of the digital age. And I can't email her anything by way of an explanation. I think this decision fell today because of two other things. The person with whom I have shared shags for most of last year returns tomorrow and someone else has asked to shag me the following night. Goodie good. Would it be fair to phrase it this way - I'm dying for a root? Tues 27th. STUCCO's server's shat itself, grr. Wonder why? One of the residents was logged into it and it died while he was foolin' with it. I checked it out later, I think it has acquired a dodgy network card (MAC addresses are never FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF and they have to be plugged into a cable before they can drop a few thousand packets a second). I initially brought around a standby machine prepared long ago for speedy replacement in the event of precisely this eventuality, dropped it there for install later. I caught up with the recently-returned-from-Amerikkka cookie manufacturer at the Fish Cafe. I came back later and discovered somethin' else happened in the STUCCO server, and although I swapped out the mobo, the previous drive wouldn't completely boot, if froze somewhere after freeing kernel memory. So I went back to the Ice Cream factory and, while the two replacement machines I'd set up were installing themselves on the geek desk, danced a carnal welcome-back dance with the Cookie Manufacturer as rain fell on the colourbond roof. I stagggered back to STUCCO with pre-installed hardware, a grin of contentment and hair which obviously looked like I'd fucked in it, and had their router/gateway running again by 2am. I slept on He-Pad's futon, woke up, drove down to a coffee shop on Abercrombie street with Adam Smith, and en-route was lane-changed into by a 4wd who didn't give a fuck as I thumped my gloved fist on their rear left window. Sydney's getting insane. I think it's time to carry a hammer in the handlebar cabling. I scored a nice pair of steel-capped boots, some aluminium chequerplate and a (suspect) pentium-II mobo from the Mekanarchy garbage pile, and in the evening went off with the mysterious South American of previous rants, for dinner and what turned into a shag with a lot of leather-against-leather noises in the front seat of her car. Beforehand, as we strode through Newtown looking for a place to eat we bumped into she-who-refused-to-shag-me and had a short chat. I think she-who-refused knew more than enough to put one and one together. I might be a slut but I'm not a liar. The South American sent me a rather complementary SMS later but maybe this just means she needs to get out more. --------- THurs 29. Degs. I finally got around to screwing some wood to the side of dad's gynae table, but it turns out it needs more offset to mount the examination light, so I'll have to come back later. With that out of my hair I did the long drive north to Normanhurst. It's been a couple of years since I annoyed Dave and Leoni. Leoni's amidst a phd and is also turning around the direction of a centuries-old girls educational institution of which she has been headmistress for ten years. Dave's been a sick boy again, he and I would have compared hernia scars but his is looking too ugly, he said. He had made his usual excellent loaf of bread, and cooked great nosh (I mashed up some olives, anchovies, garlic, and other stuff in a heavy mortar-and-pestle prior to his sticking it in the chook which we all ate together later). I also heard momentarily over the 'phone from Lou, who's in some teeny island somewhere, as far as I can tell, metamorphosising into a WarOnDwugz footsoldier for the UN. I am wondering what to say to her these days, operating in a framework where she knows half the neurotransmitters in her own head are illegal under various drug synthesis analogues laws, and she uses those same neurotransmitters to know this fact. "The rich kid becomes a junkie. The poor kid an advertiser. What a tragic waste of potential - bein' a junkie's not so good either." TISM - `Greg! The stop sign!' I find it irksome that dear old Dave's now officially living in a house a couple of hundred miles down the coast, because in order to dodge some ludicrous land tax bill he technically has to be a resident there. What of a tax system which treats its fair citizens so poorly? Michael Egan, NSW tax commissioner, you are a low prick. Blah blah, so what have you been doing... they asked. I'm tired of delivering the news, hearing a strange silence and looking at the pained expression on yet another face. I think it's the first time we didn't say grace. Either they've woken up to my atheism, or more likely they've dropped the custom just 'cos they've figured out it doesn't matter. It's been a strange conversation I've had with Leoni over the years. She's another deeply spiritual person and we've been chipping away at the epistemological edges at the rate of about one hour of conversation per annum which leaves a lot of time to think about it inbetweentimes. I had to think about it a bit when she asked the question, `So how are you going to come to terms with this?' and I said `Um.........' with a long pause before I said anything. As usual I didn't come out with the truth and say that This is cancer, There are no terms, There is no negotiation; it's blunt and the truth, but arr, fuckin' needlessly melodramatic. I think the pause happened because I was looking for terms she'd understand. I can't even remember what sort of dribble I mumbled, something about the direct jump to the acceptance stage, the tendancy I have to occasionally experience depression for a little while then go back to acceptance. Probably some other stuff. She and Dave appear to be convinced that they don't go away when they die. I explained to them that there just isn't the bandwidth to get a the information contained in a human personality out of its braincase... we speak at what, a few tens of bits per seconds? The real allocation of data carrying capacity hangs off the front of the male pelve, say, 5ml, with 300x10e6 wrigglers each bearing 1.6x10e9 base pairs, at two bits per base pair on average, is about 9x10^17 bits transferred from one human to another in the carnal act. Nature provides MASSIVE bandwidth for reproduction, and doesn't allocate even a squirt worth of bandwidth to provide an escape hatch for the personality that appears in yer brain after a few years of life. Don't they get it? Ya die, ya rot. That's it. She does know, though, that I won't go bitching to some god about it. I was more straight-up with Dave about how I'm gonna come to terms with it. I reminded him of a cartoon I like, where there's this huge oaken desk, strewn with sheets of A4 paper. The walls, the floor, everywhere is covered with sheets of A4 paper. At the desk sits an old guy with a big rubber stamp, and he's stamping everything in arm's reach with a sort of uncaring grim determination. The stamp has already stamped all the visible sheets of paper in the room. In big red capital letters, the stamp says FUCK IT Intriguing that she's as interested in The Matrix as I am. I've always thought about it in a computation/emulation sense... peel everything back and there's just mathematics and physics, the data transformation language and its implementation which the universe runs on, respectively. She'd never heard of the CellTicks in Hans Moravec's book. Has never read Go"del Escher Bach (though they have it in their house). And has no idea about the investigations which have gone into wether or not there's anything to the anthropic cosmological principle as a diagnostic indicator that the universe we know, configured as it is, exhibits any kind of design. Dave's discovered the hilarious hillbilly AC/DC cover band Hayseed Dixie and is sending me a copy of their cd. Reciprocally I've cooked two copies of AC/DC's Back In Black, probably accadacca's thumpinest album.... one for Dave and one for Dad who is sick of listening to other surgeon's poncy classical stuff being played in the theatre while he operates. I'm not sure I'd like my uterus chopped out to the strains of `You Shook Me All Night Long' but I guess that's why anaesthetic was developed. I tested the burnt copies (generated thusly: cdparanoia -B /dev/cdrom cdrecord -audio -v dev=0,6,0 speed=4 track* eject ) on the dumpster-dived stereo, and yeaah, rockin', I think I might have driven it harder than it really wanted, since at 0dB, clipping indicator lit, internal-organ damage volume, the cooling fan vent holes emit air with the distinctly burnt smell of charring printed circuit boards. "How long till it blows?" -Hicks to Ripley, Aliens It was never a hit but "Shake A Leg" is a driving, ballsy piece of music, well suited as background to say, a poll tax riot spread across several blocks, and is not to be trifled with under heavy amplification. I recommend listening to it with earplugs, so you don't hurt your ears with blistering treble hiss but still get the required internal organ jiggling from the drum and bass. It also helps if the actual cd player is in another room since the vibes mess up the laser tracking. Yeah, fuck the record companies. Like Sony needs another twenty bucks. But they're gonna get 'em... dad's lost his copy of High Voltage. Fri. Feb 30. It rained in the arvo, and I eventually made it down to Sans Souci, which is largely un-navigable now. Is there something about people south of the Georges River which means they can't negotiate T intersections intelligently? Nope, it's the signage doesn't let 'em. No Right Turn, No Left Turn, No Stopping, No Standing, All Lanes Must Turn Left, signs like this stood everywhere I looked, arrr, why doesn't the RTA print a generic All Right, Fuck Off sign and save a shitload of sheet aluminium? Maybe nobody here drives cars or they abandoned them all on the roadside when they realised that obeying the signage to get drive anywhere entailed road infringement fines greater than the nett value of the vehicles they owned. I met Trev, and he drove in his merc (which he doesn't much care for if his driving's anything to go by) down to Cronulla to a restaurant called the Naked Grape. Frank showed up a bit late but did indeed show up. Good nosh, good chatting to the old guys, who as a result of being gynos for longer than I've been alive are full of good stories, most of them only peripherally related to their job. They split my bill, bless 'em. Trev went for a piss before we left and a guy standing at the urinal next to him asked him if he was a doctor; when Trev said yes, the fellow mentioned that Trev had delivered him 20 years previously. I went back to Trev's for additional chat and to peruse the antiques he has accumulated over a lifetime. He's a man of rare depth and many dimensions. He's been quite astute in what he acquires... there's working clocks 300 years old, ceramics from the Ming Dynasty, furniture so old the insects which have bored into it are long extinct, watches hand-made with components so small the women who made them ruined their eyesight after a few years, rah rah. We had a good yack about these things, and he's _very_ knowledgable about this stuff. I think he considers himself temporary custodian of these very old things, but also accumulates them as tax dodges - and good luck to him. I wonder if his success in accumulating these beautiful, and incidentally monetarily valuable things gnaws at him, or that some people envy his success in so doing. He laughed a delightfully satisfied and contented laugh when I told him the best tax dodge is to not waste hours earning anything taxable in the first place, which is why I've spent so many hours in unpaid employ for my own amusement. He is nonetheless not clued into some important things. He reckons we don't know the atomic structures of things like Coenzyme A (it was deduced in 1950) and has no idea about a lot of important biochem and cellular metabolism. Never heard of G-coupled protein receptors (which are what make hormones act so powerfully). He's convinced that the bible's completely accurate and believable and plausible since it happens to include some anatomical correct descriptions of say, why Goliath (a pituitary giant) copped a stone in the side of the head : the big dude used his peripheral vision to see since his pituitary tumor buggered the nerves which made his central vision work. Hence the side of his head was exposed and copped the projectile. Great... a wave of accuracy in an ocean of lies does not a sea of truth make. Did it never occur to him that the boring bits which would act as controls for this sort of story got left out of this book? Does it never occur to him that nobody from his very own trade was there to certify wether Mary was really a virgin - and how, post partum, could you ever tell anyway? I had to clue him into some serious fuckups in genetic engineering before he got a clue about why it might not be a good idea to mess with the stability of the genomes of the plants underpinning say, the entirety of western agriculture. We chatted about everything, ranging from epistemology to the geological processes which led to the formation of the phenocrysts in his granite tabletop. I stayed so long chatting about stuff with Trev that it was nearly midnight by the time I left. Natch it pissed rain. So I didn't ride to Newtown so who knows what Rho's got up to. I hope she wasn't abandoned to the uncaring smoky winds of Zanzibar. Her blog suggests not. The weekend was sort of boring. Both the mobos I scavenged were deadie-dead-dead (well, a non-fixable CMOS checksum error on one, the others are totally silent). The flautist is not, I think, quite ready to let me go, by which I mean, I'm gone and she doesn't realise it yet... she's dropped off her broken cd stacker to see if I can fix it. I'm gonna do it 'cos I've never had a chance to play with one before, but I think she thinks it's just another possibly handy service to extract from pred. Well, it is, but I'm not feeling used. Yet. Joe Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Civilisations" which I have finally got into heavily, is a bloody good book. Confirms many things I suspected (like, why there's a neverending proliferation of roadsigns and the ratio of bureaucrats to people who *do* stuff continually increases) and suggests several things I didn't. I'm glad I'm dying. Don't read it if you're not. Arr shit, work tomorrow, enrolment insanity. Today, Feb 1, I lubed the bike chain, chopped some tree bits around the place (dad's massacred the ironbark suckers again but it fortunately refuses to die) and Andy mentioned conway's / was full. Amongst other things I went to chop some spam out of /home/predator/Maildir/spam/new and discovered a prolonged, churlish spew from diode, from an address other than his normal one which I blacklisted... the spam detection heuristics caught it anyway. Don'tcha hate must-have-the-last-wordists? I think my spamfilter might be better than I realise.... he mentions several times in the email that he thinks maybe my telling him to fuck off is a result of a brain tumor changing my thinking. Maybe he can't cop the fact that it isn't a pile of feral kidney cells which wrote the both-barrels email I sent him, and I was in full control of my faculties when I decided, despite my having known him for ten years, to garn geffugged. If I was inclined to change my decision before I read this stuff, I'm not much inclined to now. For a dude in his late 40s he's capable of some remarkably childish sniping. Sad. Oh well. Is it chutzpah to ask him to return to me my (purchased hardcover) copy of "Free Software, Free Society" by Stallman? The book is published under the GNU general documentation license... so technically, nobody *can* own it. ------------ Back to the grind. It's Feb 4. Work sux not because it's work but because of all the stupid risky wasteful overhead associated with doing it, like being stuck in traffic for an hour, on a motorbike, in the rain on the way to work. The schedule is stupid, almost not worth doing.. there's a 2.5hr hole in the middle of it, and say an hour each way travel time, I'm spending about as much time on the road as I am doing the work. The enrollment system has been broken for oh, eight years, and will never be fixed because it's a creeping horror of code mish-mash which nobody wants to attempt to repair for fear of making it worse and it interoperates with other systems which would also have to be adapted to changes made to it if it were fixed. Because of this brokenness there is generated a time-wasteful paper trail roughly three times the size it needs to be, which assumes one needs to do it on paper at all, which one does not. The aircon's fucked up, again, so in a room with 25 students (all dissipating about 100 watts of metabolic waste heat) and 25 computers say, all dissipating about 250 watts for monitors and 100 watts for the actual machines themselves, we have 2500 watts of human and 8750 watts of machine waste heat, there's about 10kWatt keeping the place a-swelter. It's February and not cold at all yet, and humid 'cos of the rain. So every morning I come in and unscrew the screws from the only two windows in the room to get something resembling breathable air into the place, and every night after I leave, a 'droid from Security screws 'em shut again. With new screws, since I deliberately keep the ones they added the night before. And I teach in my old purple SJC Rowing singlet. There's some good infrastructure, tho, the overhead VGA projector means I don't have to write on the whiteboard. Much better when I tie the projector screen to a heavy object, however, since it prefers to scroll up into its tube when let go. When the machine in front of me (which I use to feed screens full of code fresh off my fingertips onto the projector screen) crashes since it's running WinXP, I really get the shits. I hadda revert to the never-crashes whiteboard technology after I'd slapped in a load of weirdo hypertext link code which nobody had ever seen used before, to call things like news feeds and so on. What year was this again? Actually in the later half of the week I've reverted to using Knoppix3.2 GNU/Linux which doesn't crash, ever. So I've burnt some Knoppix3.2 (a bootable, runs in RAM, German gnu/Linux distribution) cdroms which I will give to the students tomorrow (students cannot resist free stuff) so they have a really good distro' to get acclimatised to as an alternative to GatesEmpireSoft. It's kind of fun watching people's eyes open when I show 'em how to write code. Most if not all of these people have never coded anything in their life so some of the concepts are pretty alien and the persnicketty, error-intolerant nature of the 'pootas scares 'em. In my morning class I am the only blonde in the room and some of the kids (they *are*, some barely into their twenties, reeking of the innocence which comes from sheltered upbringings) have unpronouncable names from places in Asia I'm only aware of dimly. Bright young things all, just 'poota illiterate. The students approach these semiconductor wonders unaware that they, themselves, are fundamentally alike as far as thermodynamics is concerned, except the meat of which they are made, in which they live and think and feel, is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than the silicon in front of them, and has a development lifecycle measured in the aeons. Stacks The days are full (I mark the roll and tell anyone they can leave any time they like, I'm not a gaoler!) and at night I've been working on the Sansui CD stacker belonging to The Flautist. Here's the deal: it's jammed, not working, not ejecting the 10 CDs trapped inside it either. The rig cost about three hundred bux. It contains ten CDs, which are priced at $30 x 10 plus the time/effort of locating the replacements if you lose your existing copies, so it's about $600 worth of exposure she has entrusted to my hands... plus the emotional loss if you lose your *music*. It is a fascinating bit of engineering but I had to unscrew, unbolt, desolder, prise apart, unfold, unhook several layers of stuff to get the cartridge out (rescuing 9 cds) and peel off several other layers of metalwork and circuitboard logic to rescue the last CD - a job that also required a certain amount of fuckin'about with alligator clips and hookup wires and DC power supplies to momentarily brute-force the motors which operated the transport gearing, enough to get the freakin' thing to relinquish its grip on the last disc. It took about three hours to strip it down. I rebuilt it in about two hours (no parts lost, broken, etc either) and returned it all to her and she reckons it works but I told her not to trust it: use copies of the CDs that are important to you, don't leave 10 CDs in it all the time, minimise your exposure I sent in an SMS to a new SMS she sent me. I do this stuff well and I taught myself. Would I charge the usual $70 an hour to do this stuff? Hmmmm. Maybe. I don't want to see the insides of it again if it breaks after I warned her not to trust it. Dark Izzy was updating the ink job on the Flautist's leg when I went to fix Mekanarchy's router after they changed DSL providers - a task made much harder since David the mega-body piercer deconfigured a lot of the DHCP and rc.local settings, and TPG as usual were not forthcoming about the system settings in an unambiguous manner. Plotting I more closely observed the devastation where dad had done a sly, brutal prune on the suckers coming up from the stump of the termite-stricken hardwood tree in the front yard. He can be a bastard at times, it was such a nice bushy regrowth. He's legally compelled to have it, too, since he planted nothing to replace the original tree. Later, dad and the dog were in bed so I jumped on. The dog likes to roll over, legs akimbo, guts skyward, so I can scratch its stomach, but I can get it to lick dad on command, which he hates. I was about to do this when mum walked in and sat on the end of the bed, and mentioned that we ought to buy a family plot down at the cemetary at Woronora - real estate in Sydney is shitfully costly and I'm all for minimising the rent on a patch with no water, electricity or net connection. I told 'em I didn't much give a shit if they buried me as an atheist in the catholic section - I reckon all corpses are atheists anyway, despite what the signs say (and I bet people of every denomination claim membership of all the corpses in the entire paddock) - but I figure if they could tolerate being in their place while I was alive I'll tolerate being dead with 'em. Weird... I'll decompose with a family biologically unrelated to me, a godless heathen interred in hallowed earth. This'd sort of fuck up the no-cost, suicide-in-the-bush, animals scatter my nutrients scenario, and waste additional resources digging a big hole, carving a stupid chunk of rock (I'd prefer 316 stainless steel anyway) with my name followed by a meaninglessly pretentious epitaph, putting me in a box, all that crap I really don't want. And I'll need some cash to help pay for the hole... so... where's that? Stuporannuation Some years ago the federal government made superannuation compulsory. Ever wonder why? 'Cos people knew they were being rorted by the superannuation companies, the tax system and inflation. Cash, in your hand, now, is much more valuable than an entry in a database which says someone owes you the same money in thirty years. The super companies profit on the value differential between the money you pay them and the same quantity of less valuable money they pay you back in forty years, plus and the difference in the interest they are paid on the investments they make with your money, and the slice of that which they pass on to you. As if interest is gonna cover tax and inflation... naaaah. Ask any pensioner living on a daily tin of Chicken and Liver Chumpy in fifty bux a week worth of boarding house. Dream on. And by the time you, dear reader, want to get yours out in say, 2030, there's not gonna be a functional civilisation left to spend it in since cheap hydrocarbon fuels will be long gone by then, along with the agricultural system we built to run on them. Long term, the laws of thermodynamics and the quirks of terran kerogenesis dictates what economists call a bear market, by which I take them to mean, Ursus middendorffi, as in gutted, hung up to cure in the smokehouse, and stuffed by a professional taxidermist. During the considerable hole in my schedule today I went up to the Chancellery to talk to whoever it is who runs the UNSW superannuation scheme to which I have been an unwilling contributor for as long as I've been a tutor at the uni. It turns out I have a couple of grand in there. It also turns out to be nearly impossible to extract, as you might expect. UniSuper is one tiny portion of an industry which is a systematic racket. I used to work in a bicycle shop in the city and when I got the shits with the crappy returns delivered by the Retail Employees Superannuation Trust several years ago I was sacked for venturing the opinion that one would be better putting it in a regular savings account. Nothing's changed. How is it that I chuck in a couple of hundred bucks on 15/10/2001 and by 29/03/2002 three quarters of that is gone? Or that between May 1, 2002 and 18 September the same year, the fund has actually lost fifty bucks, so the previous contribution is totally gone? According to www.apra.gov.au, to obtain my cash, I have to either prove financial hardship by being on social security for 26 weeks before I can get it (I'm dying but I am not incapacitated so that'd rule me out even if I wanted social security payments, which I don't), or I can get at it on compassionate grounds, which aren't (this is why they call them compassionate) - you can only get it out if two doctors (one a specialist) are prepared to independantly sign off on pieces of paper saying that I need expensive treatment not covered by the public health system. So I can only get the bux out to spend them on an attempt to prolong my misery, instead of getting 'em out to actually enjoy 'em before I die. And the claim form asks me to quantify all my other assets... vehicle, shares, bank accounts, houses, rah rah.. presumably to help them decide if I should sell all these things and become completely depauperate first before they'll let me raid my super. As you'd expect, the fact that I'm *dying* doesn't matter half a rodent's fuck to APRA. And they have a damn lot of cheek to place, on the bottom of a form which demands to know your financial situation in Orwellian detail, the following question and follow it with six blank lines: Please give a brief reason why you satisfy the grounds for early release of your superannuation benefits I wonder what I should write here for perusal by uncaring, bored clock-punching 'droids in a Canberran office tower. Several candidates: 1) I'm dying, it's my money, I wanna spend it before I am dead. Fuckhead. 2) See the "your superannuation benefits" in the question? This implies correctly that they're my dollars. If they are my dollars, I should not need to show you any reason why I want them. If they are in fact not my dollars, I should not fill in this form. 3) My superannuation fund throws my money in the toilet and it is silly to let them continue this. See attached. 4) By the time these sequestered funds of mine are nominally released in about 2030, they won't be worth the cost of the postage required to send me a check for them in the post. Collapse in energy supply causes massive hyperinflation. See Germany, 1933, and others, for expectable financial sequelae. 5) It is incalculably unwise to make angry by pointlessly withholding from him what is his, a dying but able-bodied man with field experience in locksmithing, electronic security systems, and the application of explosives to buildings and safes for demolition purposes. Do you feel lucky? But since I don't think these would get me anywhere, I'm gonna leave it blank. This question does not deserve the dignity of response intrinsic to even a well-sculpted string of profanities. It is noticable that the government (did I mention parliamentarians get all their super paid in from the public purse and it's not taxed?) taxes the sum at 21.5% on the way out even if the rest of my income is below the tax free threshold. At that rate I might as well just not ever show up on Mondays. Or if I was to go to work for forty years, not show up for eight of them at all. Do the math. The magnitude of this rort beggars my imagination, and I'm capable of some pretty heavy imagination: in Australia alone there's about $540 billion (that is, $540,000,000,000) in managed superannuation funds. Assuming the tax rate stays the same (yeah right - it never gets *smaller* does it?) they govt gets about oh, $115 billion in tax when all of that gets withdrawn. An annual one percent inflation robs the public of approximately five gigabucks of purchasing power per annum. As such the 'super companies are therefore paying off their retiring/retired superannuants out of the contributions of those people who are still working. These people who are still working are gonna get reamed in the long term and they won't even know why. What an absolute scam! Mine's not a huge pile, but, fuck it, it's *MY* money. I earned it _so_ I could spend it on stuff, not die leaving it in the care of bunch o' corporate shareholders and no-life fucks in the insurance industry. Who the fuck do they think they are, keeping it from me when I'm dying? Arseholes. I could get really cranky about this... only the extremely stupid stand between the dying and their cash. If someone swiped half a grand off you in the hotel carpark they'd get a couple of years in the slam for robbery. In comparison, it appears it has been legislated that by superannuation, not only we are robbed but also that we pay the robbers to rob us. Crime pays, and pays very well. Copious whinging aside, looking at it another way: my strategy has turned out to be correct: minimise my exposure to the greedy shits at the ATO by earning as little taxable income as possible. Most people'd piss their pants in visceral ecstasy if they were only losing a few hundred bux to superannuation tax. Most lose tens if not hundreds of k$, which for most people slaving away their whole lives earning normal incomes is roughly equivalent to financial arse-rape with a Saturn V rocket. So strategically, even if they refuse to relinquish any of it to me (because, say, they decide I'm not really dead), it'll turn out to be only a small fistful of hours from my life down flung the toilet earning the money of mine which they have. I win by recognising the parasitisation and refusing to feed it. You only own what nobody knows you have. It's the night of Thursday Feb 5 and as I absently feel my neck I think, in a somewhat paranoid manner, that perhaps Bill is stirring again. Yes, indeed he is. I'd estimate he's about 10mm on his largest axis. Arrr, shit. The problem with having a convenient diagnostic metastasis is that my emotional state goes up and down as it grows and recedes. --------- Feb 7th I've been working on a kilowatt-hour meter setup for catalyst since we never know how much juice we use running the servers (we make an estimate - not a measurement). I scavenged most of it from the squats I used to live in at Broadway in 2001 after the South Sydney Council cut our electrickery off. Stutterin' Jus' Hewitson scored a hundred dollars worth of residual current cutout device in a power point he scavenged from a dumpster, so that's gonna be incorporated to prevent people getting zapped working on live equipment, plus two other power sockets and a circuit breaker. It's nearly done, but there's a lot of metalwork to finish yet. There's already LC noise filtering on the active rail. I'll solder in some spike-suppression MOVs later. The novocastrian purple death faerie didn't show up on saturday arvo but melburnian Rho did... albiet the best part of an hour late. It was good chatting to her. We went for a stroll around the Newtown cemetary (which has the highest concentration of empty alcoholic beverage cans, used condom packaging, nitrous oxide bulbs and abandoned bongs of any cemetary I have visited - and the locals fuck on the tombstones) and thought about epitaphs (she thought of a good one - `so that's what's under here'). Cluckiness has her. She's making some waffly arguments about doing everything that a body can do, in much the same way as one might argue that one should do all the things one's really good tool could do, with the tool in question, being preggers is something she wants to experience. I think deep down she's rationalising. I mean, I can theoretically do ballet dancing with my body but I don't think it's a good idea. So she's on the hunt for some DNA (and associated encapsulation/delivery system) to start a rugrat and I clued into the fact that she was asking me about it, in part because she'd be interested in *mine*. But I am a sample of one - with no pedigree and no history I cannot know what genetic damage I harbour. Anyway I (and 90% of the populus in cities) carry a teratogenic virus, CMV-3, to which I think the rugrat-in-process better not exposed if possible. I'm declining for a number of reasons. In no particular order, the world's crawling with about six billion excess humans already. Neonates born now will grow up (or not) amidst the Hydrocarbon Depletion Collapse which is not gonna be fun to live in, I suspect to the extent that they will curse us for ever conceiving them. Being dead would make me the kind of absent father a kid would grow up to hate, I suspect. And, this is the age of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism) paternity testing, and the legal system tends to suck child support out of biological fathers of children regardless of the contractual circumstances of their conception. She wants anonymous code but cannot get it by asking the donors, and the donors with worthwhile quality of code live in bodies with brains of sufficient depth and calibre to know it they walk on dangerous ground and will not donate. This discussion reactivated an old thought process: that the GNU GPL should apply to the genomes of organisms. A neonate has to be considered in the light of what it actually is, which happens to be a collaborative biological software development project. With no known living relatives, I'm freeware, pretty much, but I cannot donate my code under the GNU copyleft, since hers would have to be copylefted too, on account of it occurring consequently in the diploid rugrat which the GPL would also cover. How would the Ashkenazi tribe to which she belongs take to the discovery that their precious genetic material (with its unfortunate tendancy for Guillaine-Barr and Tay-Sachs disease) was suddenly GPL'd ? And of *course* I cannot guarantee my genetic material's fitness for merchantability or any particular purpose - who knows what nucleotidyl errors lurk in my Sertoli's cells? In any case, there'd not even be any fun from the point of view of the code transmission event since Rho, so she sez, isn't into penetrative shagging any more, and she's trying to find partners who are spontaneously into bondage and domination, but her search is not helped by telling people that she's into bondage and domination and pain, which ruins the spontaneity - they have to know it in advance, and cannot learn it just to get her off as if she's some kind of technical problem in need of a solution. Now, I'm into occasional, tactically applied mains electricity (stepped down, of course) and can tie knots well enough that I can and do entrust my life to them, and have a shed full o' tools capable of inflicting anything from mild irritation up to mortal injury. She asked me some months ago at Nomes' if I was up for a shag, and I was (for a while). But the offer has ended. I'm getting the feeling that I'm being jerked around again, or maybe it's that my head has changed, and my perception of women has altered. There's no rule that says that they have to shag me, or even live up to their offers to shag me, just 'cos I'm dying. But much is going on in Rho's head at the mo... it's like her Fallopian tubes have reached up through her peritoneum, grabbed her by the carotids and threatened her with death if they're not somehow filled with a pile of foreign nuclear material (and I don't mean soviet plutonium). The clock is ticking, she knows. So it is for all of us. ---------- Sunday 8 Feb. Time of the signs. On the outside of the buildings where dad has his offices were attached two large (2m x 1m... they make a great BWONNNNG noise when they flex) sheet aluminium signs, which advertised to the world that his partner practised there (the other two advertised that dad has his practise there). Since Frank has retired now there's no point having the signs any more so Frank wanted 'em removed. So I removed 'em, and had to abseil off the roof and down the side of the building to do it, in stinking heat and searing glare, with dad directing pedestrians away from the footpath under my work area. The signwriters painted the screws in, so I had to hammer them off with a chisel, which took a long time. Once the things were detached I belayed 'em down clamped hard in vise grips, which were tied to slings tied to me with a harness and figure-8. For two hours of work I pull $300. Cookin' cashflow. And Frank will love me for gouging him that hard, since he paid nearly six times that much for the hire of a cherry picker to install the signs but a short year ago. Frank's a mate, so he gets Mates Rates. If he pays cash. Michael Carmody's retirement fund deserves none of my cash. Fuck, i'm busy, packing in a LOT while I'm on the way out. -------- Monday 9th was a good day but the evening was better. The day was stinking hot, I went home, got out of my sweatty dweeb clothes and into my usual utilitarian rags, then went to Cinque where the Purple Death Faerie did indeed show up. She's six foot of piercings, hair extensions and 2nd year architecture student cool. She was not especially worried about Kev, which was good to know. By the time we'd finished chatting it was raining, a hot, steaming mist floated up off the King St bitumen. We walked to the graveyard at St Lukes and sat up the back of the dark cemetary and chatted some more. Screams of DIE, DIE, DIE came from a woman (we found out later her name was Lockie) sitting on the back door of the church. We walked over and enquired why she was yelling this out and she said "Anger Management". We freaked out a couple of normals (we all yelled "DIE, DIE, DIE" at them and they looked oddly at us and walked hurriedly away). Then in accordance with local custom the Purple Death Faerie and I went back to the rear of the cemetary and after decorating each other with various bitemarks, shagged enthusiastically on a worn sandstone slab as the rain fell upon us in the spooky shadows, to the accompanyment of fruit bats fighting in the trees and the sound of several of the beads in her hair falling off and scattering across the slab. If there is a god, I am going to hell, and I am looking forward to meeting all the other people who have shagged on this rock. We rode back to her student accom in the light drizzle, and to my amazement she fitted ALL THAT HAIR into my spare 'cycle helmet. -------------- Feb 13. A week of tutoring and driving, lemming-like, my motorcycle back and forth, but a tiny drop in the hydrocarbon-powered, daily metallic tide which rushes into the CBD before 9am and rushes out again at 4:30. The roads are jammed with cars, almost all of them 75% empty of passengers. And why do I suffer this idiocy instead of driving in an hour late (30km in is a fair drive, I'm not gonna ride that on the treadly). Oh, I dunno. The money, partly. But I think the students enjoy my ranting about the evils of governments, censorship and that corporations are trying to turn the internet into television, like they've never heard anyone lecturing at uni express an opinion before. One of my students has a 'blog (I deduced it from the content of her first assignment) and she (almost an optometrist, we hadda long chat about optic nerve bandwidth, rhodopsin alleles, UV absorption in lens crystallin, Nepali myopia epidemiology, and a few other things, hence I spent a couple of minutes looking at it) wrote that she enjoyed the chat and liked that I knew a lot about a lot of stuff. Wow. I'm not gonna own up to having read it. --------- From predator@cat.org.au Sat Feb 14 00:06:38 2004 Date: Fri 13 Feb 2004 00:12:04 +1100 (EST) From: predator@cat.org.au To: predator@cat.org.au Subject: MS has perfected the art of the fucking annoying error message. I was forced to use Puke XP today to mark 50 HTML files from the students, and I have seen the following error message at least two hundred times, 6 times whilst quoting the message. I do not have the Windows Explorer browser open.... maybe that's that they call their OS now, tho. Just Mozilla open, and it works. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something the information you were working on might be lost. PLEASE TELL MICROSOFT ABOUT THIS PROBLEM. We have created an error report that you can send to help us improve Windows Explorer. We will treat this report as confidential and anonymous. To see what data this error report contains CLICK HERE [Send error report] [Dont send] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Natch this comes up right in the middle of the fucking screen right on top of whatever you're trying to do. It wont go away unless you click one of the buttons. If you click the SEND ERROR REPORT button another window comes up which also asks you to click it. This cycle repeats about twice a minute. ARRR! FUCK! FUCK! BLOODY BLOODY FUCKING FUCK!!! BILL GATES DIE, DIE, DIIIE - how is it that fuckhead is still walking around alive? Make an OS which, if it must have errors, doesn't annoy the shit out of me in the process of reporting them! FUUUCKWIT! This is NOT EASE OF USE. And like you'd trust MS to treat anything as confidential or anonymous. Ha. Ha Ha HAHAH! Suuuure. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's also a spunky woman in her mid-20's, with an amazing grin and a much better tan than I have (she is Indian... brown hair, brown eyes, brown-flecked corneas, even brown *gingivae* - does she have *any* pink bits?). She's in one of the tutorials which i don't run, which is good, because I'd compromise my academic impartiality if we got involved, which I'd like to, since we've chatted a bit and I think we find each other interesting. She gives me _those_ furtive glances. And she has a very suggestive name. Her first name is homophonic with Zyn. Meaningless to an atheist, but most inviting, I think. Her second name is Amurthalingam. I dunno what Amurtha stands for but I know what a lingam is. She *gives* me one. We've decided to go guzzle some burnt arabica nut juice somewhere this weekend and blab about stuff. I dropped in at Harrigans on the way home from Uni. Christine hasnt aged a day, her youngest daughter'd be 21, and is becoming like her older sis Tash. Their kitchen is different, they've remodelled the living room. Greg's still cycling. Nick's startin' a PhD. Wow. Model citizens, for certain kinds of citizenries, I think. Diode dropped in my copy of Free Software, Free Society. Good. I've finished the CAT power meter / circuit breaker / noise filter / spike suppressor / residual current device mains feed board, but am yet to test it cos I don't wanna trip the house out (and still have to solder the MOVs in but that'll take two minutes, it's a no-thinker). I put it aside and configured my long black pants with several pieces of stainless braided hose, for tomorrow night at Vortex. I want to convince myself that I look as if the Borg have assimilated my leg, and after I dance around in this crap for a few hours it will certainly feel like they have. Ow! Sitting in front of a uni poota for two weeks let me read about carbonic anhydrase IX as a prognostic marker for tumor survival. It's expressed a lot in most of the tumors which kill the people who host 'em. I wonder... does it express this stuff in reaction to local pH? Which is something HCO3+ would buffer, you stick on a proton using this enzyme and create CO2 and H2O. Ok, this file is far too fuckin' long. I'm gonna freeze this one and start the next. It'll be at conway.cat.org.au/~predator/ides.txt cos it's Fri 13th. WHo gives a shit what the filename is so long as you can find what you're looking for? I know it sucks to copy'n'paste. The HTML for a link to the next file is ides.txt Click away. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------